February 1

This update has been long long overdue. There were some problems with both 1.51 and 1.52, so I decided I would skip those and go directly to a major update called 1.53. Unfortunately moving to a new place and life in general, prevented me from doing that as fast as I would like to.

So what has happened to 8BitBoy? The core mechanics of the game has been optimized all-round and the game-engine has been updated extensively in several ways. This should decrease lag and increase performance for PC users. This is especially true for Nvidia users who used to experience problems with lag and changing framerate.

Still no good news for Linux users i'm afraid. 8BitBoy is based on Node-Webkit and it's still not working properly with Linux. So I really hope there is a solution soon. No would like 8BitBoy to be on Linux more than any other platform.

Mac users aren't missing out on this update, because 1.50 runs splendid already on Mac.

I hope you enjoy the new tweaks and find the PC version of 8BitBoy more fluent than earlier builds.

Reviews

“8BitBoy is an enjoyable yet quite hard learning experience that’s worth all the times you die, and more.”
8.5/10 – Novo Adagio

“8BitBoy is an excellent re-creation of the games that started it all”
7.9/10 – ManaPool

About This Game

Huge classic platformer with tons of power-ups and 16+ hours of main story & 300+ hidden locations just begging for exploration. 8BitBoy is a tribute to all the greatest platformers of the 80s and 90s and a symbol of my endless love and passion for gaming.

Who's 8BitBoy?

8BitBoy is out of a job, and quite frankly he's depressed about it. Then he suddenly remembers all the good times he had as a kid, playing his trusted 8-bit console. Deep down in the far and darkest corner of the basement he finds it along with a strange looking cartridge. He plugs in the cartridge right away, and get sucked into a vivid, but decaying world of platforming. And this is where your adventure takes off.

8BitBoy is the platformer I always dreamt about playing as a kid.

It's a fantastic mash-up of the greatest of the late 80's and 90's and a complete game on it's own terms. This is a true tribute to old school gaming and by no means a walk in the park, but it's also never unfair. With big challenges, the sense of accomplishment is always bigger and better.

To me, 8BitBoy is the ultimate classic platformer on PC and Mac. and a symbol of my love and passion for gaming.

8BitBoy is billed as a huge platformer (with 16+ hours of main story) by the developer on the Steam store page for the game but that is a bit of a misnomer. Whoever is taking 16+ hours to clear this game is either 90+ years old having never played a computer game in their life or a 2 year old toddler who is in the process of developing his/her hand and eye co-ordination. Having played for just over three hours I have already managed to reach the fifth and final world. Sure I can see a bit more longevity in the game if you seek out all the secret rooms within each level but 16 hrs is definitely pushing it. Also if there is a story in all of this outside of some grown man booting up his 8-bit console and magically getting sucked into its game world then I must have missed that part.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=355374546Booting up the game you are greeted with a simple message from its creator who professes his undying love for everything gaming related. There is no denying he was obviously heavily influenced by the platformers of yesteryear - particularly Super Mario Bros. - because at the heart of it 8BitBoy is a simple Mario clone (with the main character and the world he inhabits basically ripped straight from the 80's Nintendo Mario classics). Mushrooms are replaced with birds as our titular copy-paste hero bounces on heads to remove enemy obstacles. In much the same way Mario punched blocks to reveal coins and power-ups so does 8BitBoy. It's all very...retro chic but without the chic bit. 8bitBoy does give the player the abilty to shoot projectiles but its never really explained why eating fruit such as blackberries gives the hero the ability to shoot out tiny little fireballs. If you played any of the old NES Marios back in the day, 8BitBoy will be instantly recognizable as you traverse its five different worlds. Where the game excels is in delivering a great little chiptune soundtrack although it's very limited musical array starts to repeat fairly early on.

As a homage, 8BitBoy is perfectly serviceable and while it isn't going to bring down the house it should offer those looking for some 8-bit nostalgia a relatively fun-filled time. In the end 8BitBoy achieves what it sets out to do...almost! It's still no patch for the actual games it's inspired by and I would say you are better off going to play the original Mario SNES classics, which are freely available all over the internet today, but considering the price ($3.99) and that clearly 8BitBoy is made with an undying fandom love and you could be doing a whole lot worse with those $4.00.

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This game appears to have all the elements that would make it fun, but it's faulty mechanics and a ton of other stuff just ruins the fun.It is a very hard in all the wrong ways; very punishing and somewhat repetitive.

I'll try to justify why I'm not recommending it, since it seems like a lot of work was put into the game and the dev updates it regularly, which tells me at least he cares.

First about the levels.

Within each world some levels are super hard but others are a walk in the park. Specially if you are just shooting for the end without exploring. Having branching paths and secrets is ok, but have your main level be interesting as well. That's just like making an RPG have awesome side quests and a bad main story. Side quests are a bonus, not the main stuff, it's like the topings on an ice cream.

Variety is also an issue, each world has a lot of levels, but they all feel like the same level with rearranged stuff. Each world introduces some new baddies and graphics, but they are not well distributed or introduced.

Also, levels are long but they don't flow right, I find myself a lot waiting idle for a monster to get out of the way or a moving platform to reach me. Or sometimes the opposite, for example on the flooding levels, where you "escape" water that rises, since it expects you go down the bazillion secret paths, if you just follow the main level the water is never even close to you. This just tells me the levels were not really planned much, stuff was just thrown there. I would much prefer fewer levels but better planned than a ton of levels all the same.

The enemies don't follow any "consistent" pattern, they move, jump and shoot whenever they want. This extends to other stuff, for example one of the enemies throws a big snowball that sometimes hits the wrong pixel and rebound on a different direction from where it was supposed to go. This happens with a lot of stuff including the bosses, they rebound against the walls in a weird fashion when they jump.You die because you can't predict stuff, it's just twitch reactions a lot of the time or simply impossible to dodge.I'm honestly not sure if this is related to framerate or whatever, but it's just an ingredient for a bad plaformer.Consistency is what makes these kinds of plaformers fun (at least the ones this game is trying to emulate). On most games from the NES/SNES/Sega era, the enemies and the enviroment reset on each life, and always move the exact same way when you respawn, so you can learn the level. This way when you die you know it was your fault.

Moving on to glitchy stuff

Hitboxes are weird. Sometimes you don't properly hit platforms or pass through them.

Solid blocks and non-solid blocks look the same.

Some of the background can be confused with platforms.

Breaking squares from below also behaves badly, sometimes you have to hit squares twice or more.

Throwables from enemies go through stuff. I was hit a couple of times by one of the small snowballs from an enemy I wasn't even seeing on the screen.

Finally, my biggest issues, several game mechanics are bad:

Level exploration is super punishing. On my playthrough I was going through levels in a straight line to the finish. Levels are super hard already without exploring, and exploring is just pointless, any benefit is crushed by the fact that any mistake and it's back to the start without power ups. Exploring stops being fun after the 30th death, where you have to redo the entire level from the beginning, while also loosing the power up. Risk is not worth it just to get a couple extra coins.

The power up system is very unbalanced. The game doesn't know if it wants to be a shooting plaformer or a jumping plaformer, and the mix is not well done. A power up makes enemies super easy, but no power up makes them a nightmare. You are massively underpowered without a power up. And, let's not overlook the fact that, if you don't have one, you die in 1 hit. So you can't shoot, but you also insta-die, it's the worst and not well balanced. Levels don't help at all, some enemies are even impossible to kill by jumping, for example the birds that fly high and shoot at you. If you compare this to super mario for example, the difference is that in super mario the main focus was jumping, and you could finish all levels just with small mario, the flower was just a "nice to have". And if you compare to most shooting plaformers the difference is that you already start with a gun or have means to handle enemies other way. In this game the balance is bad, and you start with nothing each time you die....

Last, the lives are just worthless. The fact that, loading the save restores your power up when entering the level, just makes it better to have 1 life with a power up and get a game over on each death. Also, harvesting lives is horrible. If you are going to make a game inspired in old games, bring only the good stuff, not the bad. In any case, harvesting lives doesn't work here, because A) it's super hard so you would need like 2000 lives B) there isn't any fun level to quickly get lives C) on each death you loose the power up D) it's better to get game over and continue than having lives

The rant ends here, these game mechanics were the last thing that ruined it for me, but they could be fixed with changes like:

Adding checkpoints would encourage exploration. Super nintendo games added them for a reason. If you want to keep the difficulty, you can do something like Shovel Knight or Bit Trip Runner 2 where you have the option to break or skip the checkpoint if you want.

For the power ups the easiest would be to make the shield be a default on death, and make the first pickup be the red berries. An alternative would be to better balance the levels for when you don't have any pickups. Since right now it's a death sentence.

The behavior on death should be the same as loading the last game or something similar. I would just get rid of the lives system entirely. The game could keep track of the deaths but have them be meaningless except for points or something.

I may not be good at it. But this is a GREAT game! It may have the elements of mario and some others but its supposed to. Its a fun little platformer that is actually pretty long. It could take a couple hours or maybe a day depending on how you play it, or how good you are.

At first glance, I wasn't especially impressed with 8BitBoy, but a few of the reviews were positive and the game was heavily reduced in price so I thought I'd give it a go. To its credit, it does evoke a sense of nostalgia; the visuals and music are very reminiscent of a Genesis/SNES game (thus making 16BitBoy a more appropriate title, but that's splitting hairs). The graphics are simple and cartoony, everything is brightly-coloured and you can clearly see what is an enemy, what is a powerup, a platform, etc. The game's presentation is fine.

However, in an attempt to emulate some of the classic platformers of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, I feel that 8BitBoy has not quite hit the mark in terms of quality gameplay; your character seems to slide around very easily, almost as if every level were an ice level. I've also noticed that the main character's hitbox when it comes to platforming is smaller than its sprite; classic platformers like Mario and Sonic allowed you to land your foot on the edge of a platform and be fine, yet in 8BitBoy you had better make sure you land square on a platform, otherwise you're likely to fall and die.

Death is another problem with this game. Lives are in short supply, and the levels have no checkpoints. Granted, they're not really long enough to warrent them, and there is little downtime between dying and respawning. However, because of the aforementioned hitbox detection, death is very likely. And the power-ups you'll have collected (which amount to a series of slightly different projectile attacks), will be lost. There is a plus-side to this; the game autosaves at every level, keeping track of your lives total and power-ups when you enter a level. Hence, when you get a game over, you can restart the level with everything. However, this completely invalidates the point of having extra lives. If I die in a level and lose all my power-ups, why would I want to play the level without them, when I can just suicide until I get a Game Over and restart the level with my arsenal intact?

I can't really say I can recommend 8BitBoy. I've not played it long, but the brief period I've spent trying it has been enough to dissuade me from ever playing it again. I would say the developer has their heart in the right place, but I feel they have more lessons still to learn from the classic platformers they clearly idolise. A solid attempt, but that is all.

- Can't find one. Seriously, for a really cheap game made by an independent developer, you'll need AT LEAST 4 hours to go through all the levels, much more if you're trying to beat the game in Ultra difficulty and/or if you don't use any warp zone.

At a glance, one might be tempted to conclude that 8-Bit Boy was nothing more than a cheap Super Mario Bros. knock-off. While the game unashamedly barrows from said title (not to mention a number of other classic platformers), 8-Bit Boy nonetheless manages to please. Ironically, it is because it harkens with such transparency back to many-an-old-school side-scroller that this title is such a surprising joy to play.

The controls are very good--much better, in fact, than many of the games from which it models itself. Level-design does not disappoint either; while simple, they are all just about the right length and offer some pretty rewarding treasures for those adventurous enough to explore all the nooks and crannies. In fact, once you have beaten the game, you are able to select any stage in order to collect anything you may have missed on your first path.

The difficulty gets kind of steep in places (I had to resist a rage-quit or two), but it is not so brutal that the challenges cannot be overcome with a little persistence. Keeping at this one and making progress turns out to be very rewarding, and the bosses are fun to tackle and put away.

The soundtrack, while not mind-blowing, is a notch above serviceable, making it plenty good for this sort of outing. The composer certainly succeeds in capturing the old-school tunes of yesteryear, which actually get to be rather catchy after awhile rather than annoying.

Graphically, the game appears a "bit" archaic, but since every ingredient in 8-Bit Boy is designed to evoke late-80's gaming, they are perfectly suitable.

I have returned to old games like Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, and Donkey Kong Country again and again. 8-Bit Boy is like any of these titles in the sense that it can be enjoyed more than once on account of it being well-designed, fun, and relatively short--especially once you get dialed back into the "twitch-thumb" playing you used to do while sitting in front of the old cathode ray tube, Nintendo controller in hands.

So if you have a hankering to revisit those crusty-old NES cartridges, you might want to grab this inexpensive game as an appetizer. You likely won't be disappointed.

This is the first game in a long time to make me feel like a kid again.

8BitBoy is a perfect backflash to playing Giana Sisters, Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Wonder Boy in Monsterland. I find the story very personal and I love the seemingly endless amount of hidden places. The controls feel a bit chunky in the first minutes, but you master them pretty fast, so not a real biggie. 10/10.

I am driven away from so many platformers with great potential simply because they lack an interesting story and a connection with the character(s). Anyone who has played 8BitBoy will tell you it is not one of those games and its touching introduction will have you hooked right off the bat!

As for the gameplay, it is flawless and nostalgic. The music and graphics remind me of playing classic Pokemon and Super Mario games and the controls are very smooth (I recommend using a console controller).

Full-clearing the levels is also very challenging (and rewarding if you are going for highscores) but it is not entirely necessary if you just want to beat the game. So if you're a gamer who likes to go for 100% on every level, I say good luck and bring extra controllers! :)

All things considered, it's a fun game with an intriguing story and it is a must try if you love platformers!

Great game!! It's a very fun throwback to the Mario days and it really reminds you a lot of those types of games. It's fun to explore and there are tons of hidden secrets and fun places to explore and you have to make sure you finish the levels in time!! They revamped a lot of the levels and updated many things and it's a really fun experience!! I give it an 8/10

8BitBoy is A painfully average retro style platformer. The game adds nothing new to the genre as a Time Travelling Gamer from the Early 90's could easily find the game mechanics familiar in the year 2015. However, it is moderately challenging at times and for only 3.99 USD is a good time for a more then Fair price point.

Finally got around to finishing this game 100%, and I loved it!!! Definitely gives off that old retro platformer feel with some fantastic level designs and well done hidden areas. Boss battles are probably the biggest "letdown" for me because there isn't that much variety with them... but at the same time that is exactly what a lot of older games were like, especially Mario which had to have been a huge influence on this game. So overall I would highly recommend it to fans of old school platformers, especially when the price is only 65p right now in the weekly sale!!!

This game is absolutely amazing best platformer i have played in years. This game really brings me back to my childhood(THE NOSTALGIA IS OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). I really love this game, it is a nice breath of fresh air with all the games that come out nowadays. It seems like a combo of classic sonic and mario games, sounds odd but works soooo well. It is soo rare to find a gem like this and for $4 you can't beat that especially if it is on sale. So if you grew up with and/or love classic retro video games just do your self a favor and buy this game now.......just do it. final verdict 5/5 amazing

If you like the old school super mario games you will definitely like this. I got it for a dollar on sale and it's definitely worth the four dollars it's priced at. Theres plenty of secrets and alternate ways to complete levels, and it is incredibly challanging at times.

Edit: Wow, I'm surprised there are so many negative reviews, people are seriously complaining about the frame rate, difficulty and the price.

The people complaining about frame rate and price have to be trolling. As for dilliculty, if it wasn't somewhat difficult it wouldn't be worth buying because there would be no satisfaction to completing a level...

This game is very similar to M*rio 3. Every moment was nostalgic and with help of modern technic it has become a much enjoyable game. Fighting against cute and various type of enemies through the goal: This game is quite fun. The game isn't easy. It isn't hard either but I must say it is simple which I expected this game to be.

+) Cute and various type of enemies.+) Reasonable gameplay amount.

-) Steam browser in-game doesn't work at the moment.-) It's not a problem but it would be much better to have a mid-checkpoint.

Played it for like 10 minutes, I can already tell it's going to be a very decent game, especially for the $.99 I paid for it. It's just like mario, the controls take a moment to get used to. In fact I've not even passed the first level and died 6 times before I wrote this review.

It's very colorful the movement feels great, the music is good. Buy this game, support little games like this, you never know what good dev teams can produce when they have the money.